I can’t post my personal favourite xkcd here, it’s too big. Definitely worth a few minutes, though.
This is wrong - Olmecs originated in the area around the modern city of Veracruz, Mexico. Maybe he’s using a very loose definition of “Central” America.
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Sneaking inaccurate Central American history past you is like trying to get an inside fastball past Barry Bonds.
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His take on the market is it’s all completely rigged with insider trading and always has been.
What, you mean “you’re not supposed to tell anyone else wink wink haha heehee or else its a violation of ethics you totally can’t drown in your new swimming pool in your new mansion” might not be the airtight plug on insider trading I’ve been led to believe?
Also it’s weird to list “Mayan culture” before Olmecs, who are universally recognized as the first civilization in Mesoamerica. But who knows what culture means so I gave it a pass.
I was just happy to see he didn’t forget about the New World civilizations entirely - like all our high school history books seemed to.
Jesus can you imagine if we started American History class with the Bering straight and described in some detail the history and culture of the people who lived here… and then finished the first half of the class with the Columbian exchange in all it’s gory detail?
You do that one time in the US anywhere but a college level history class you are getting fucking fired.
Honestly I feel like the history education in this country is a huge part of how the systemic problems get passed on. If there’s one subject we should have vastly more of it’s history… and not the dates and statistics that we currently emphasize for some reason, but the stories of exactly what happened and why so that we can all learn from those experiences. It isn’t important to preserve a record of what happened in the past ‘because it’s cool’ it’s important because it’s the console log of our civilization. The mistakes are at least as important as the successes, because they are often really important warning flags. If our population knew its history a lot of really nasty stuff wouldn’t be still happening.
In particular I think a healthy democracy almost requires a population that is aware of something close to a true history of their nation. Anything else and they just aren’t qualified to make the decisions that Democracy asks of them.
I actually had a very liberal teacher for AP American History in 10th grade. She told us all kinds of horrors about the Vietnam war. I think she was going kind of rogue though.
I also had a Biology teacher in 9th grade who told us evolution was all bullshit. He basically said, I have to teach you this, and then rolled his eyes the whole time.
Pretty scary. (Apologies to all those who cancelled the NY Times because there was a bad editorial or whatever.)
If the 1%ers are moving to jewelry to diversify and reduce exposure to the markets and currency, we are so unbelievably fucked lol… Wow.
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It’s probably like one or two nutters buying out the jewelry shop. Or the watch guy sold the watches too low. I also don’t trust what exactly is happening given JT’s description of the guy.
There’s such a small period in a collapse where jewelry is worth a damn. It moves pretty quickly to just trying to survive.
GLD is up like 15% this year in my portfolio. I view gold as a reasonable hedge against inflation (I prefer holding the metal but GLD is a reasonable cost proxy ITT). Given the Q1 stimulus, recent run on gun purchases, and significant fear of BLM from the right, it would not surprise me if the wealthy are loading up on jewelry. Trouble is, you gotta buy a lot of jewelry/krugerrands to make this worth your while if you are a rich. In the Supreme Court thread, @boredsocial made a comment to the effect that our side is winning. I am beginning to come around to his way of thinking.
ETA: “winning” in this context just means Trump may actually be on the ropes, obv not “winning” in the equity markets. I do think WAAF from an equity market current valuation line of thinking.
Don’t listen to stupid anecdotal nonsense. Actual super rich people have almost all their wealth in business ownership (both public and private) and real estate. The stock market has returned about 10% annually over the past century, meaning you’ll double your money every 7 years on average. Properly leveraged commercial real estate will generally be slightly less lucrative but provides fantastic tax benefits and, usually, less volatility. No actual smart person is buying watches as an investment. Come on.
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I agree with this but do you concur that a lot of “wannabe” rich people are buying the recent narrative of Biden raising taxes in addition to the conditions I mentioned? Those folks skew towards gold bug thinking on a good day.
I have family members who rebuilt the family fortune in Taiwan using some gold and jewelry they smuggled out of Mainland China when the Communists took over. I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but I’m not shocked that really rich people might have some diamonds and other shiny objects stocked up in their go bags. [Alternatively, some rich people are probably getting even richer during this time, and they may just be buying up shiny objects because they like shiny objects.]
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In S. Vietnam people couldn’t own houses for about 20 years. Then when they could again, all of a sudden a few of them they had cash to do so. The guide on our tour (in 2000) said they probably buried gold somewhere.
The returns I cited occurred through a period including a great depression, at least 3 major shooting wars, a cold war, 12 recessions, 9/11 and the Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Nixon, Reagan, Bush II and Trump administrations. This is an absolutely awful time in our history but in terms of personal finance, the stock market remains a fantastic place to have your money long term.
It’s probably a money laundering thing.
They got crushed in their earnings report today, but I was able to get out at open at $8.49 per share, returned 23.9% in 3.5 weeks!
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Yeah… when you’re doing value investing correctly it’s semi difficult to lose in any way but vs the benchmark (where you will get crushed frequently lol).
The reality is that money means different things to different people. I have some, but I also own a business… and being able to make decisions without any time or cash flow pressure at all in my business is good for my paycheck.
It’s weird being in the ownership class… you stop accumulating wealth for reasons like ‘retirement’ and start seeing your net worth as a kind of game. My #1 rule as a business person is ‘never lose real money’ and I generally let my winners run and cut my losers quickly. Why am I using this strategy? Because I don’t have anywhere near enough money to be mistake proof in search of maximum returns. I also can’t tell myself that I’ll get it all back in the long run with the stock market. Business concerns will be demanding cash at the bottom of the market every single time.
I definitely get why rich people from developing (or former developing within ~50 years, people learn how to do this stuff from the previous generation usually) countries would buy jewelry. It’s a hedge against the whole societies economic system going violently sideways. The poster whose family dug up jewelry to reboot in Taiwan when the CCP took power was absolutely right.
When you have enough money to survive indefinitely your first priority (unless you’re a crazy person) is to keep what you have and stay rich. This brings the long tails firmly into focus and leads to things like buying stuff you suspect is worthless just to make sure you don’t miss out on the next big thing.
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Sold my AMZN. I’m gonna try to finesse this thing and time the top. Nearly doubling in a few months isn’t bad.
Sold my MSFT too. 12% above previous pre-covid all time high seems like there just can’t be that much upside left…
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